A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Doug Beeman.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays. Or subscribe via RSS feed.
Please Note: Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing. Also, the headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here, and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
In an effort to protect the drinking water source for one
million Bay Area residents from destructive wildfires, crews
will soon work to masticate vegetation on Maple Way around
watershed lands. In collaboration with Cal Fire, the San
Francisco Public Utilities Commission, who oversees the SFPUC
Peninsula Watershed, will hire contractors to mulch vegetation
into small pieces. Reducing the size of vegetation growth will
limit the risk of extreme fire around the watershed, the
Edgewood County Park and surrounding private property, said Cal
Fire.
Dr. Lisa Wainger led her first meeting today as chair of the
Delta Independent Science Board. Chair Wainger will guide the
Delta ISB for the next two years as they continue promoting
independent, peer-reviewed science to support Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta decision-making. … In addition to serving on
the Delta ISB since September 2020, Chair Wainger is also a
research professor at the University of Maryland Center for
Environmental Science where she focuses on the optimal design
of environmental restoration investments using a suite of
ecological and economic models to evaluate costs, benefits, and
risks and to identify incentive changes that could motivate
action.
Thousands of dead fish have washed up on shores across the Bay
Area in recent weeks. A red tide is killing everything from
anchovies to sharks. Preventing a similar disaster may cost the
region billions of dollars. In late July, Mary Spicer noticed
that the water lapping around her kayak started to turn red. A
few weeks later it was dark brown. … Jon Rosenfield,
senior scientist with environmental group SF
Baykeeper, says Heterosigma may be killing fish in two
ways: It can produce a toxin that is deadly to fish, but it can
also result in low dissolved oxygen levels in the water, which
can be deadly.
Rafael Cuevas Uribe wants to rid the Eel River of all female
Sacramento pikeminnows in order to help the river’s salmon
population. Cuevas Uribe and Andre Buchheister, professors of
Fisheries Biology at Cal Poly Humboldt, were recently awarded a
$150,000 grant from CalTrout, a non-profit conservation group,
to help eliminate the invasive species from the Eel River. …
Cuevas Uribe and Buchheister hope to use an aquaculture method
of breeding fish that could result in a population of all male
fish, keeping the pikeminnow from being able to continue to
reproduce. The Trojan Y strategy modifies the genetics of the
fish to produce YY males.
In Portugal’s Douro Valley, the team at the Quinta do Vesuvio
winery was stomping picked grapes in ancient stone lagares
(troughs) in August. “Never in the history of this great
estate, which dates to 1565, have grapes been trodden this
early,” says Harry Symington, whose family has been producing
premium ports in the Douro for five generations. The
nail-biting tale of the 2022 harvest—scorching heat and
record-breaking drought that sped up ripening in vineyards from
Germany to Paso Robles, Calif.—is another reminder of the power
of climate change to upend the wine world. … With a
sudden heat dome over Bay Area vineyards on Labor Day weekend
and the days following, the rush was on to grab grapes before
they turned into juiceless raisins.
Art Chianello, who has led Bakersfield’s Water Resources
Department through two of the state’s worst droughts and one of
its wettest years on record, is retiring at the end of
September. Most municipal water departments are fairly quiet
operations. As long as water comes out of taps, not many people
pay attention. But the Bakersfield water department is in the
unique position of also tracking and managing flows on the Kern
River – a highly contentious piece of water – which it partly
owns.
The first appellate court to consider a case regarding
California’s curtailments of senior water rights held that the
State Water Resources Control Board (“State Water Board” or
“Board”) lacked authority under Water Code section 1052(a) to
curtail pre-1914 water rights based on the unavailability of
water for use under such rights. The curtailment cases began in
2015, in the middle of a multi-year drought, when the State
Water Board curtailed the exercise of many water rights across
the state in an effort to implement the priority system arising
from California’s water laws.
Scorching temperatures and reports of water scarcity are
grabbing headlines, as drought caused by climate change creates
long-term problems for farmers and communities in the United
States and around the world. … As frightening and as
insurmountable a challenge as chronic and growing water
shortages may seem, there are solutions at hand that can save
us from crisis. A small country in one of the driest
regions in the world is among those that have
developed policies and techniques to provide water in cities
and farms alike. That country is Israel. -Written by Seth M. Siegel, author of “Let There Be Water:
Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World” and “Troubled
Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink.” He is currently the
Chief Sustainability Officer of N-Drip, a company which
developed water-saving technology for agricultural use.
A tantalizing storm headed for California this weekend could
help fight the Mosquito Fire — now the state’s largest wildfire
of the year — while providing a brief respite from a years-long
drought….Some meteorologists and climatologists believe the
rains will deliver slight relief from a drought that’s parched
the state, left acres of farmland barren and lowered
reservoirs. Still, even the most optimistic observers warn that
the benefits will be temporary, and the dry period is far from
over.
During a summer of soaring heat, shrinking supplies and
mandatory drought restrictions, Los Angeles residents conserved
water at an impressive pace in August, with that month’s usage
dropping below a record low set during the previous drought.
But it’s becoming clear that this alone is not going to be
enough. The crisis on the Colorado River, a key source of water
for Southern California, is expected to bring painful cuts to
supplies in the coming months. And hopes of a wet winter are
looking more unlikely with another year of dry La Niña in the
forecast. Now, the pressure is on to not only increase savings,
but also double-down on efforts to reduce reliance on imported
supplies and to invest in long-term water solutions.
Arizona is facing dramatic cuts in water deliveries from the
drought-imperiled Colorado River. But many water managers there
aren’t that worried due to a long in the works conservation
strategy. … The idea is you bank the water for
lean times. The excess is then pumped back out of the ground
and into taps in the city about 30 miles east of here. In fact,
a lot of Arizona has been banking its Colorado River water in
underground reservoirs like this for decades. The state
pioneered the practice because it had to, says Kathryn
Sorensen. She’s a water policy expert at Arizona State
University. … “It’s a secret underground reservoir. You’re
right. Most people really aren’t that interested in water
issues until there’s a crisis.”
Deadly floods in Pakistan. Scorching heat and wildfires in the
US West. Torrential rains in Australia and Indonesia. A
megadrought in Brazil and Argentina. As climate change pushes
weather disasters to new extremes, it’s La Nina, an atmospheric
phenomenon, that has been the driver behind the chaos since
mid-2020. And now the planet stands on the cusp of something
that’s only happened twice since 1950 – three years of La Nina.
Another year of La Nina means the world is hurtling toward $1
trillion in weather-disaster damages by the time 2023 wraps up.
As a 20-year drought creeps ever farther up the Colorado River
Basin and seven Western states vie for their fair share of
water under the century-old Colorado River Compact, [Flaming
Gorge Reservoir] on the Wyoming-Utah line is a new
flashpoint. Nobody disputes the root of the problem: The
agreement dates to a cooler, wetter time and is based on
assumptions about precipitation that simply no longer apply, in
part due to climate change. But as business owners like
[Tony] Valdez are finding out firsthand, recreation is just one
of many competing priorities while growing demand in the
basin’s more populous downstream states — California, Nevada
and Arizona — conflicts with dwindling supply from the more
rural states upstream — Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and
Wyoming.
The second driest state in the country, Utah, doesn’t
contribute much water to the Colorado River as it flows from
Rocky Mountain headwaters through Canyonlands National Park to
Lake Powell. Utah has a unique position in the middle of
the river basin, geographically and politically, and it wields
less influence than thirstier and more populous states like
Colorado, California and Arizona. Its sprawling urban
centers along the Wasatch Front, which are home to 80% of the
state’s population, are outside of the Colorado River Basin and
are less dependent on the river than cities like Phoenix or Las
Vegas. Only 27% of the water used in Utah comes from the
Colorado River, with the majority of the state’s water supply
coming from other rivers that feed into the Great Salt Lake.
David Villarino-González envisions a day when rural communities
finally have clean drinking water, and when crops on farmworker
cooperatives thrive through droughts or wet seasons. His dream,
which isn’t that far-fetched, could be a game changer in a
parched San Joaquín Valley whose livelihood depends on water.
Cadiz Ranch and the Farmworkers Institute of Education &
Leadership Development (FIELD)_ announced Thursday a $5 million
partnership to set up an innovative center to train farmworkers
on state-of-the-art technology that produces clean water. The
ranch has 45,000 acres in the Mojave Desert where it will teach
people about water conservation, groundwater management and
sustainable agriculture.
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is designed to force
an end to groundwater depletion but does not actually “kick in”
until 2040. A requirement to create a sustainability plan for
the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin was submitted by the county,
rejected, and then resubmitted. The plan had to select a target
for conservation and chose the 2017 water storage levels,
probably because that was when the memorandum of agreement was
signed by parties to the plan.
Rain may be returning to our forecast, but this storm won’t be
enough to end the ongoing drought. California hasn’t seen
significant rainfall and months. The hope is that the rain
forecast for this weekend will help the dry conditions and put
some more water into our reservoirs. The latest map from
the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that almost all of California is
still experiencing severe to exceptional drought conditions.
That includes the Bay Area. In Marin County on Thursday,
Lagunitas Creek below Lake Lagunitas has been reduced to a
series of stagnant pools of water, but it’s not all bad news.
The renewable energy revolution will require the world to
ratchet-up lithium production to make batteries for electric
cars and devices. As with all mining, there are concerns
about lithium mines, but some experts overstate the potential
environmental cost while neglecting to mention a big advantage:
mining for lithium is much cleaner than mining for coal.
… At the Salton Sea in California, geothermal power
plants tap the brine and produce lithium as a
byproduct. Estimates show that the Salton Sea holds enough
lithium to provide all projected future U.S. needs for the
battery metal, and 40 percent of the world’s future needs,
according to experts cited in the video.
Contaminated water has been found in urban areas in California,
including the affects to the Central Coast, according to data
released by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation.
Imidacloprid is a neonicotinoid (or neonics), a pesticide that
is also linked to bee die-offs. These pesticides are shown to
disrupt the nervous system of bees, other insects and songbirds
causing paralysis and death. … According to the CDPR,
this insecticide can remain in the soil for long periods of
time and be transported by rain or irrigation systems, which
leads to contamination in California’s water.
Already battered by drought, dwindling supplies and climate
change, California’s water treatment systems also suffer from
problems that raise the specter of long-term health issues,
according to a state report. Those findings – and others – were
contained in an audit by Michael Tilden, California’s
acting state auditor. The audit, released in July, focused on
the State Water Resources Control Board (better known as the
Water Board), which regulates the condition of water across
California. Despite the State Water Board’s celebration of
the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the
legislation that protects clean state water, Tilden’s audit
found that the state of clean water across California needs
improvement.
